For a full decade before his 2003 debut feature The Station Agent, Tom McCarthy was a boyishly handsome character actor — and a boyishly handsome character actor he remains, appearing in parts as diverse as the favored son-in-law in the Meet The Parents movies and the Baltimore Sun fabulist who invents a serial-killer story in the fifth season of The Wire.
Now with two more features under his belt — the 2007 drama The Visitor and his immensely likable new film Win Win — McCarthy has emerged as the quintessential actor’s director, though that’s not entirely meant as a compliment.
Not surprisingly, given his background, McCarthy seems more committed than most to writing roles that give actors something to do. There are six or seven parts in Win Win alone — some major, some as minor as two to four scenes — that feel substantial and fully realized in ways that elude most filmmakers. He also has a great habit of showcasing gifted journeyman actors who are usually relegated to supporting parts: think Peter Dinklage in The Station Agent or Richard Jenkins in The Visitor. Even Win Win star Paul Giamatti, an A-list superstar by McCarthy standards, hasn’t exactly spent a career siphoning roles from George Clooney’s well.
Yet McCarthy’s sensitivity to character and performance covers up weaknesses in other areas; his films are visually undistinguished, with the paint-by-numbers drabness of a thousand other indie dramas, and his stories have a tendency to appear more rough-hewn and unconventional than they turn out to be. On balance, the nobler qualities of Win Win come out ahead, partly because the ensemble is so exceptional and partly because McCarthy writes himself into interesting little corners before he contrives his way out of them.
By now, the Giamatti persona has been well-defined — exasperation and despair, tempered by mordant wit — but the actor’s every performance is like a snowflake, and here McCarthy provides him a role that’s subtly down-to-earth. Giamatti plays Mike Flaherty, a New Jersey lawyer whose dwindling practice threatens the modest middle-class life he’s built for his wife (a reliably terrific Amy Ryan) and two daughters. Through a desperate act of legal chicanery, Mike assumes guardianship of a mentally compromised client (Burt Young) in order to collect the $1,500 monthly fee for taking care of him.
